January 2008

31 January 2008

[Some lyrixxx found their way onto the blog, to what end I'm not sure. Can't possibly be worse than the bullshit blogs you'd be reading otherwise, can they? I wanted to write a love song set in outer space.]

i thought i heard you speakinga million miles awaythought a heard a heart breakinga million miles awaynighttime is holy here like homea million miles awayi feel your warmth though i'm all alonea million miles away

(sort of a chorus)i learned the words to a song tonighti heard them as a comet passed byit said'we were no closer when you were at my side'well that's alright

i woke up wondering 'what is this place?'just like yesterdayread the paper, shaved my facejust like yesterday

i'm a messenger for the human racea million miles awaygot worries i can't erasejust like yesterday

27 January 2008

...this: We addressed a couple dozen save-the-date cards for invitees to the big day. We watched the first three episodes of the new season of The Wire at Lindsey and Rugs's house after an easygoing dinner at home. And now, on the comfortable side of a few glasses of wine and wondering how the hell McNulty's gonna pull this off, and unable even to figure out how I feel about the whole thing, I can hear the ladyfriend talking on the phone in the next room, Georg Solti's epic Ring Cycle recording is on the hi-fi - Gotterdamerung's final act, gorgeous - and finally finally the end of the Inferno is beckoning for tonight or tomorrow morning. [Maybe I'm a Philistine or something, but I find Dante (or the Ciardi translation anyhow) unspeakably fucking boring thus far. From a dramatic standpoint, the Inferno is of course a failure; nothing is ever at stake, no development occurs, only amplification. In that regard it reminds me of The Alchemist, another structurally elegant work of utter characterological shallowness. As poetry it's not particularly beautiful, nor particularly elegant (though Ciardi is game); grounded as it is in grotesque Catholic-cosmological nonsense, it puts forth an arguably-interesting argument about a somewhat noxious topic. But I feel like I'm completing an obligation. Not since the first dozen cantos have I felt any affection for the work. Maybe I'm way, way, way ahead of my time! I'm looking forward to the last two books though; they have harder work to do and that appeals to me.]

Well wow, before I went off about my apparent inability to rise to Dante's poetic challenge I was saying today was quite nice. Maybe that's not enough to justify these couple hundred words but I, along with of course my boy Wagner here, can only say piss off and thanks for stopping, and see you tomorrow. Different soundtrack same song, really.

25 January 2008

Illinois Democrats close to Sen. Barack Obama are quietly passing the word that John Edwards will be named attorney general in an Obama administration.

Installation at the Justice Department of multimillionaire trial lawyer Edwards would please not only the union leaders supporting him for president but organized labor in general. The unions relish the prospect of an unequivocal labor partisan as the nation's top legal officer.

In public debates, Obama and Edwards often seem to bond together in alliance against front-running Sen. Hillary Clinton. While running a poor third, Edwards could collect a substantial bag of delegates under the Democratic Party's proportional representation. Edwards then could try to turn his delegates over to Obama in the still unlikely event of a deadlocked Democratic National Convention.

As usual, Novak's phrasing is in line with his status as M.P.C. (see opening paragraph). But if Obama and Edwards are talking directly about this, that's a good thing, no matter what vile jelly is reporting it. And Edwards as AG seems a good thing as well. Either candidate will likely reward the possible king/queenmaker Edwards, particularly after a long campaign slog, and I can't help thinking Obama and Edwards have a great deal more in common than Clinton and Edwards. Let's hope Edwards votes his conscience either way.

A friend said yesterday that she's excited to have the chance to vote for a black man or a woman in the Democratic presidential primary and the general election. I claimed that Obama's candidacy is a hell of a lot more meaningful than Hillary's, that the latter would advance the cause of American women far, far less than the experience of a black man running the country would alter perceptions of blacks in power. Why? My own reason is a homebrew notion: sexism stems mostly from misunderstood or limited or even authentic experience (men and women tend to have met each other, and combat breeds resentment - and almost everyone knows what it's like to have a mom running something), while anti-black racism often stems from lack of experience (whites tend not to see black community and political institutions up close). The notion, then, is that Barack Obama stands to expose Americans to rhetorics and experiences that are largely foreign (starting with his organizing, community-based Christian progressivism, which I still think is his most powerful liberalizing tool); Hillary Clinton embodies principles to which everyone in American has been exposed in one way or another, fully or in part, right or wrong.

But there's a shorter explanation: Bill Clinton. As one blogger puts it:

If Hillary Clinton wins, her success will become a lesson in how women should achieve power: marry well; put up with any humiliations your husband throws at you, and then, maybe, if you fight dirty, and ask your husband to run your campaign, you might be able to ride his coattails to your "own" political success.

(Go here for a short sharp shock from the same writer. It's unfair to say Hillary asked Bill to run her campaign, though she obviously didn't ask him to go on vacation until Super Tuesday...)

The former president has been doing radio ads in South Carolina; they go like this (read the whole thing):

I want to thank you for twice giving me the chance to serve as president. The 1990s were a time of prosperity. We created more than 22 million new jobs, moved eight million people out of poverty, and turned our economy around.

Sullivan sez, 'What a sad, final betrayal of feminism. Even worse than sliming and smearing female victims of her husband's sexual harassment.' I wouldn't go that far, but Sullivan - whose laughable adolescent preoccupations and resentments toward the Clintons unfortunately fill up most of his time lately - raises a point on which I remain unsettled. It's fairly clear what an anti-Clinton campaign will look like, and it's clear the Republicans are genuinely excited to run such a campaign, their own sorry state notwithstanding. The political climate in this country will get much, much, much worse if she's nominated - and worse if she's elected. Not because she's a woman, but because she's Hillary of the Clintons. And I wonder, out of a spirit of what I think is generosity, what would her presidency do for American girls? And boys? What are the implications for feminism(s) of the woman with the best shot at becoming president being Hillary Clinton? (I can't answer those questions. Still, the post doesn't end here, for better or worse.)

Look, Bill Clinton has as much right to campaign for his wife as any of the other candidates' wives for their husbands - except he doesn't. His status as former president invests him with a responsibility to honor the office, which doesn't mean 'behaving' (it was too late thirteen years ago), nor bowing and scraping before executive power. It means seeking stability and fairness for the office and its works. Atop which he's one of the faces of the Democratic Party, its most recognizable member, something of an elder statesman (weird to think that), and his willingness to lie outright about the records of other Democrats - while not unexpected - should be a cold-water reminder of what the last Clinton presidency looked like. He and his wife are part of the same machine; they've lied spectacularly to the nation for years on one another's behalf. Their politics blend ugly centrism with ugly identity politics and thinly-veiled militarism spattered with opportunistic 'muscular anti-war' hand-waving.

Then you have the broader fact that Hillary Clinton's candidacy appears to be predicated on two conflicting notions: its transformational potential (woman with absolute power, however qualified by her husband's manipulations) and its Boomer nostalgia (back to the Decade of Clinton boomtown, however decadent). The Clintons' political machine has Hillary running simultaneously as the Wife Of That Beloved Figure and, disingenuously I think, a New Kind of Leader. Is she capable of forming her own political identity as president? Sure, why not? She's smart and ruthless. But this campaign is bringing up depressing memories of the Clintons' dotcom-era psychodrama, and her grand example for America's young women may well be: I enabled him, he enables me, and you can best move forward by taking a big dynastic step back. Trading on your name (and smearing your opponents, even within your party) is what the boys do, and girls, it's easier than you think! This grand climax to so many liberation struggles will be...a flashback. Poor drama, and bad teaching for young observers of politics.

Now I want to be clear here: it's not the case that the biggest problem with Hillary Clinton's candidacy is her husband. And it's unfortunate for her that she's up against a fellow Democrat (two, actually) who does seem to represent a change in the way Washington does politics. What's unfortunate for us is that she has the opportunity to be something far more than Bill Clinton's Wife, acolyte of the interest-group-driven politics of the 90's, subscriber to the Rove's Almanack of Politicks victory-by-division newsletter. She has a chance to be more than merely Clinton - she took his name, doesn't mean she has to take his bullshit, nor do we - and she's failing, day by day, vote by vote. If she gets back to the White House, my worry is that every little girl in America will look at her and think, 'Women really can do anything men can do' - and miss the point that she might have done something else entirely. The main function of the president isn't lawmaking, at which Hillary Clinton would be competent; he or she is to be a mythic figure, character in the story the nation tells itself and the rest of the world. A negotiator and representative. The Clinton story is not one I look forward to telling my daughter(s).

When Joe Average looks at a conventional pornographic video as an aid to self-pleasure, several levels of (self-)perception commingle:

1) 'I am imagining myself in this situation.'

2) 'I am watching other people in this situation.'

3) 'I am aware that I am watching others.' ('I am aware that this is not a video of me.')

4) 'I know that this is "forbidden" for many people.'

5) 'I am not actually seeing this event occur; I know that it has been staged.'

6) 'I know that I will probably not get involved in such situations.'

This is by no means a simple thing. And notice what's missing: 'I'm glad that that is being done to that person or those people; it's right and good.' Sitting in moral judgment of porn and what it represents isn't exactly a stance encouraged by the text. The collision of (1) and (3) is complicated - (3) and (5) aren't obliterated by (1), no matter what Noam Chomsky thinks.

22 January 2008

Farhad and I saw Cloverfield this afternoon. I love Drew Goddard's writing and expected to be alternately excited about his work and irritated by most everything else about the film.

I experienced some astonishments, some fulfillments, and some disappointments, adumbrated hereafter:

Astonishments

Total emotional investment - and suspension of disbelief. As you may know, the film is a 'found footage' take on Godzilla-style monster flicks: big thing comes to NYC, tears the city up, plucky band of survivors attempt to escape, improbably carry camcorder around the whole time. Less than eighty minutes of footage total.

The incredible thing is that the pretext (the 20somethings are making a goodbye film for a departing friend, whose secret love is captured on the tape over which the movie is recorded) is beautifully set up, and the emotional weight of the opening quarter-hour totally carries forward into the film. The plot hinges on a seemingly inexplicable choice by the male lead, and several small-minded critics have called out that plot turn as 'unbelievable,' seemingly unaware of how silly they sound criticizing an 'unbelievable' giant monster movie. In any case, in emotional terms, it's not unbelievable at all: the characters think they're going to die, hope they don't, and act (in a time of emotional and physical extremity) as honorably as they can. It's to Goddard's credit (and that of Matt Reeves, the director) that this decision is both believable and admirable. Remember that Goddard cut his teeth on Buffy, where loopy premises were wedded to painful emotional fidelity 22 times a year. The 'What would you do at the end of the world?' plot is Lost-done-right; but its stylistic precursor, in many ways, is Joss Whedon's masterpiece 'The Body.'

And it is assembled with attention to simultaneous nobility and emotional smallness worthy of Whedon himself. Totally surprising.

Strong acting. This was a shock: with only a few exceptions, the acting is believable and low-key. The final moments are a noteworthy achievement, as is a lovely quiet interlude in a subway station. 'Low-key' monster movie acting? Yeah. Only one of the revolutionary things about it. Bonus: if you cringe during the big goodbye scene in Matrix: Revolutions, this movie is a chance to see it redone with aplomb. And it ends with a grotesque, macabre twist that brings you right back into the movie's emotional throughline (peril). Pulled off gracefully by all involved.

Handheld works. Let's be clear: this is nothing like The Blair Witch Project, exposed by this movie's narrative integrity as an exercise in shock horror without any dramatic heft at all. The camera moves aren't sickening, but they're tense, and most of the way through the film I was a bundle of nerves. It wasn't particularly scary, but it hit me hard; I walked out expecting the city to have disappeared.

Fulfillments

Great, believable dialogue. Goddard is precise and evocative without being mannered; that's a hard thing and he pulls it off without any apparent effort. This is a funny movie, even amidst the carnage and running-rapidly-about. And the romantic moments are lyrical without being sappy; they don't overstay their welcome. (Another lesson emphasized at the Whedon School of Writing.)

Brilliant special effects. CGI looks bad in close-up, almost without exception. The monster at a distance is as good as it can be. I'd expected believable special effects and the movie more than delivered.

No musical score: it works. Plus, when Michael Giacchino's score kicks in over the closing credits, it's this hilarious/thrilling pastiche of every monster movie cliché ever recorded - and produced/mixed so as to sound like something straight out of the 1960's. After the monster-verité style of the preceding hour-plus, the crazy drums-and-wailing-female-vocals approach has weight. A bold, smart creative choice at both ends.

Silly, reasonable framing device. I understand the purpose of the framing device - this is an unedited tape found in the area 'formerly known as "Central Park,"' so we know from the outset how things end, and so we can guess how they'll end for the characters. That gives tragic heft to their decision to do the Pure Thing. Old technique, as I recall. I was a little skeptical of the 'found footage' pretext, but it ended up making the whole thing that much more bleak; the unhappy ending resists the framing device's tendency to 'sanitize' things, and in the ironic battle of emotions at story's end, it's the honest sentiment that wins out. The film's final line packs a punch, and the framing story enhances it.

Disappointments.

I don't actually feel any disappointment about the film; it's just really, really well done. Rather, I have a problem with the most noxious of 'critical' trends surrounding Cloverfield.

9/11? Oh grow up, people. This is a movie in which New York City skyscrapers are knocked down and clouds of dust approach crowds of people who run and scream. In other words, you'll see it as a tasteless '9/11' evocation only if your ability to comprehend disaster has atrophied pathetically in the more than six years since that day. Remember, this is essentially a Godzilla movie (though the monster resembles a combination apatosaurus/octopus). As it happens, some filmgoers in the U.S. don't actually live in New York, and others are capable of experiencing art about difficult subjects without caterwauling about their personal tragedies and preoccupations and nightmares. Insensitive? Fine, I'm insensitive. As Farhad put it, 9/11 taught filmmakers how to represent skyscrapers falling down with something like authenticity. But the iconic quality of these images doesn't belong to September 11, 2001 in any sense.

I'm not about to tell anyone not to make movies about scary clowns, though the mere sight of the book/video jacket for It gives me nightmares. Nor do I find it tasteless to make movies about cancer, nor impossible to see such movies without imagining my mom hooked up to a breathing machine in a hospital in Buffalo. Nor would a veteran object to the idea of a war movie.

The critics in New York who complain about the 'obscenity' or inappropriateness of the film's (conscious) evocation of the events of September 2001 are really complaining about a band of Los Angeles filmmakers daring to make a movie that isn't a video diary of their own real or imagined suffering. Poetry after Auschwitz was not barbaric. Nor are images of skyscrapers falling in New York. Is there a purpose to Cloverfield? Enough, I'd say. Anyone waiting for the 9/11 edition of Schindler's List to help them feel good about their total impotence on that day should save the ticket money and buy an hour of cheap therapy. Or a camera, to make their own disaster film. Monsters are responsible to no one, certainly not to the memory of the dead; that's one of the things - lest we forget - that makes them monsters. (And one of the monstrous things about one day in September 2001. Lest we fucking forget.)

Does Cloverfield have anything to tell us about 9/11? Not really (though it's a grim reminder of how it may have felt). And neither do you, SmugSelf-SatisfiedSchmuckNYCCritic. Though you've certainly had your fucking chance.

21 January 2008

This piece, about Apple's new optical-drive-free ultrathin (gorgeous) laptop, is very, very sharp.

So, too [like the late lamented Mac Cube], is the Air a proof-of-concept. The concepts it sets out to prove are the clearest ones implied by its name: that data is weightless, that storage is wireless (a concept augmented by the parallel release of Apple’s new hard drive-equipped wireless router dubbed Time Capsule), and that connectivity is ubiquitous.

Five years from now, I suspect that laptops will typically look more like the Air than like my MacBook. Small will win. Wireless will win. Multitouch will win. Security, ubiquity, and interoperability will win. The iPhone changed things, in ways analysts and 'smartphone' addicts still don't seem to understand. And the Air is its direct descendant, conceptually: a portable computing component that leaves home computer tasks to your home computer. It's part of a computing ecosystem, and doesn't pretend to be a self-contained device. It's incomplete as yet - presumably six to twelve months from ubiquitous wireless/cellular access - but the Air is to the laptop what the iPhone is to the 'smartphone': more expensive, more hermetic, and able to do things out of the box that its competitors can't begin to imagine. Gleeful self-quote:

[B]etween the AppleTV and the iPhone, we can see the outlines of a coherent vision for what comes after the personal computer, which isn't a new vision but which is a long leap closer to reality because of Steve Jobs and company: extensible modular devices, omnipresent networking, home data storage distributed invisibly among multiple machines. The box attached to your TV with the Apple logo; the phone in your hand; the Luxo Lamp-looking PC on your desk where you do your homework and make posters for parties; the device that senses when you wake up and plays music from your docked iPod; the control box for the lighting in your garage, with a broadband connection and a Web frontend - all these things are computers, one like the other, in different form factors and with different levels of complexity and extensibility. That's not new. What's new is that it's here and it's being aimed at Joe Consumer.

[...]

What's now your PC will someday soon be part of a suite of networked devices in your home; it'll be powerful, moreso than today's PC's, but it'll be different, and some of its features will be gone entirely, except among retro-minded users. (Start with the traditional QWERTY keyboard, a weird technological artifact of the typewriter era.) And its functions will be dispersed among a half-dozen or more devices around the house and office and subway station and public plaza. The PC is just one tool for interacting with certain kinds of data - some of which are better suited to other hardware interfaces entirely.

The MacBook Air is a public invitation to think about information in a new way. Which, since Apple is no longer a 'computer' company as such, may as well be their official ambit.

Of course if you're around Boston you've probably heard about Tosci's closing; apparently the owner owes more than $160,000 in back taxes. I didn't realize until today that the owner of Tosci's was also the last owner of Davis Square's late lamented Someday Cafe - and that he's the one who 'forgot' to renew his lease for three months before the landlord decided it was game over. Somerville residents implored the new tenants to share space with the Someday, but the owner of the crepe place that now occupies that (excellent) location was dubious about getting Rancatore involved with his new venture:

Creyf, a 41-year-old Belgian immigrant who plans to start serving crepes there come September, seems quite sure that he does not want to do business with anyone who may not have the business skills and credibility he requires, and said the move to sign a lease was a purely business move on his part.

I imagine he's feeling good about his decision now.

How is it possible to run a business like Tosci's - with its several Greater Boston locations - and simply 'forget' to sign a lease? Or fail to pay down such an enormous debt over the course of years? I mean, personal taxes are one thing, and admittedly he'd lost his Harvard location last year (meaning a steep decline in revenue), but Rancatore can't possibly be as bad at his job as this makes him look, can he?

Can anyone clarify the situation, here? What's the real story on the unpaid taxes? Mistake, malfeasance, and how would you know which one to assume? And as Jeff says, if there's legitimate suspicion that homeboy has been simply evading his taxes and claiming poverty, why would anyone help him? Is 'confusion' a good reason for a 25-year-old business to run up such a debt over five years? Again, not paying taxes for a year I understand, if you're in dire straits; you can make it up easily enough. Getting into trouble because you've taken a risk expanding, that makes sense. But the Rancatores are giving really unsatisfying, even unbelievable reasons for being in this situation. What's the deal? (I'm trying to evaluate the morality of helping them out with a donation. Personally I can't afford to donate, nor would I be particularly inclined to, but I'd like to see the angle if possible.)

I should say, as well, that I'm glad the Rancatores have left the comments section open on their Save Tosci's blog - it's a rancorous and therefore depressingly enjoyable read. In any case, when Someday closed I assumed the owner was a fool. Now there's more evidence to support that supposition - yet I can't help thinking darker thoughts. More's the pity; I liked the rainbow-coloured adopted hometown full of grownups that existed in my mind, thanks.

* * *

From a commenter at the savetosci.com blog:

Toscanini's supports many community charities and schools. They sell great products, and always treat customers with the utmost courtesy. They spare no expense in making the best ice cream. Gus and Mimi live very modestly and plow all earnings back into the business. They have not stashed away the tax money, as the now State realizes. In years past their bookkeepers were incompetent and taxes didn't get paid. Nobody knows how much, so the State made up their own figure--does anybody doubt they chose a highball number? (Gus is too polite to say this publicly.) In fact, they have stayed current with tax payments for several years, despite losing 2 of their 3 stores. They have already caught up with money owed the IRS, and now are dealing with the State. The total owed to the State is mostly for penalties and interest, NOT sales tax collected or payroll tax withheld. Gus did not choose bankruptcy, which would have allowed him to wash his hands of all taxes owed. If the store reopens, employees keep their jobs, the State gets both back and current taxes, and we get great ice cream.

Toscanini's has cleaned up their act. Let's help them over this last hurdle. If you can, pay them back for what they have given the Community over 27 years.

I opened this document to rant about holiday travel and the insufferability of the airport bureaucracy – as well as to complain pointlessly about the dice-roll that is late-December travel in New England – and as I typed the words 'My current status' a friendly, only slightly frazzled female voice came over the loudspeaker to announce that flights to Washington-Reagan had been cleared for landing and could resume boarding. So I have only a few minutes before hopping a plane from Boston's unremittingly dull Logan airport to the nation's capital (an illogical three-hour stopover 'en route' to Buffalo).

I find airports bracing; like any good American I feel a fury rising as I pass through the largely pointless, more-than-a-bit inconvenient TSA checkpoint, with its casual elision of the expectation of privacy or even solitude, but I'm usually able to pull back from pique and remember that air travel is in fact a miracle, and even remotely organized or efficient or air travel doubly so. Several hundred passengers-to-be are seated around me, occupying themselves (or trying, or failing), and a staff of hundreds is making this enormously complex task not only possible, not only affordable, not only accessible, but routine. The miracle, frankly, is that the planes ever run on time in the first place.

Affirmation

Of course, in Washington itself the planes aren't running on time at all; the fellow at gate 35A yells into the microphone about 'brotherly love' in an attempt to keep passengers' spirits up, which the people around me appreciate. 35A is swamped with people, travelers in various postures of (im)patience and (di)stress, sitting cross-legged or fetal against every available vertical surface, and the delay has pushed the mass of travelers past its usual aversion to proximity, so every proper seat is taken as well. It's heartening in a way. The miracle of flight seems distant in time and space; outside the terminal window the only visible plane makes no gesture at movement, and the rain makes a mess of any would-be holiday festivity.

I'm seated up against the far wall here in 35A; the miracle of this building is that every wall is somehow the far wall. There's a pricey laptop bag next to me and I covet it.

I'm almost jealous of the young children who are experiencing this as an adventure: anything new, anything away from home, anything that brings you closer to other human specimens. Like a living museum of all fifty states. Well, 49 maybe: I can't conceive of anyone having the opportunity to be in Hawaii and still choosing to be here, in Washington D.C. or I suppose Virginia in the grey holiday drizzle two days before the 2,007th Christmas give or take. 'Two of those planes are going to Norfolk, two are going to Rochester. One is going to Philadelphia. Huntsville is one of the twelve. 3851 not here yet, Providence not here yet, Greenville not here. Norfolk 3911 delayed to 5:00 boarding...' The fellow at the desk has a charming African accent, as does his female counterpart, and the air of cosmopolitanism their lilting voices lend to the place is undercut by the enormous American flag across the hall. It's got the words 'D.C. Market Place' written on it in glowing white letters. 'Big bitch is finally moving,' says a smiling fellow in a thin moustache. His accent is maybe southern; it reminds me of home though home is in New York. And he's right: out in the dismal rain beneath the midafternoon blank slate sky, the big bitch really is rolling out from one or another gate, or at least thinking about it. The 'affectionate' habit of referring to vehicles as 'old girls' or 'great big bitches' or somesuch strikes me momentarily as grotesque.

Flight 3851 to Thereabouts and Environs is called and the mustachioed fella says ''scuse me gennlemen' and grabs the laptop bag next to me, his trucker cap nearly hitting me in the nose, and I'm reminded again of how few questions I think to ask. Ever.

Amendment

The state of things at Washington-Reagan Airport is such that U.S. Airways is apparently no longer bothering to update its Arrival/Departure boards; in consequence of which the only indication that my flight to Buffalo is delayed at least an hour is that a half-hour after its original departure time it hasn't left, hasn't arrived, or maybe even left whatever city comes just before this one in its itinerary, hasn't taken whatever several steps precede the crucial step of actually leaving the earth with me and my suitcase on it. There's something obscene about all these airplanes stuck on the ground; the squat profiles of jumbo jets make them look less like injured athletes than fat people pining for fitness. As if they could just shed thirty pounds and kick off the ground. Looking out the window depresses me, would depress me even if the weather weren't like an art-directed parody of Jack the Ripper's perpetually overcast Whitechapel.

The air is jacket-cold but not bitter, and every tree in sight is January-naked; someone smokes a cigarette leaning against a lamppost, someone throws an arm laughing around his wife, someone walks bundled up and ancient with two grocery bags. Occasional breezes laze through the plaza in Davis Square, unseasonable and easy. A left-handed guitarist in a knit cap taps his feet on his too-low mic stand, bending over into a question mark to sing: 'Your attempts are pathetic / to undermine me / No you just don't get it / Is it so hard to see? / Going to have to do better than that.' The mic picks up as much of his nimble fingerpicking as of his voice, friction of skin on string. Waiting at the crosswalk is a mother all in fashionable black, right down to the baby carriage. The guitarist brought something to give away, at least. It's January, on the downslope of a shocking warm spell, practically t-shirt weather earlier this week, and the only colour was put here by people: advertisements for Cracker Jacks, Coca-Cola machines, the Italian flags painted on the overhang of Mike's Food & Spirits. 'Give me something / I'm lost in the wood.'. The sun is close to perfect. No one moves too fast, people in sweatshirts and stocking caps are smiling at one another. Fresh air in the closed room of this small city in winter. When a young guy walks by and drops change into the musician's bucket, it rattles the mic stand, which rattles the mic, which broadcasts a percussive advertisement for the man's generosity (repaying generosity). I didn't see, only heard. Of course if he'd dropped in a whole dollar no one would've known but the man with the guitar. He gets out a glass slide to play some dirty blues and a two-year-old smiles at him. But not at me: I brought nothing to give away today. Growing richer off of all of them. Six strings rattle on the glass and the girl's mother gives her some money to pass on to the man. I don't hear any plinking sound, only the man's profuse thankyou. Must've been a dollar.

Can we please, please, please just take it as a given that human life is overrun with 'hypocrisies and neuroses' and stop praising every wanker with an MFA who comes along with a too-precious-by-half 'It's so hard being a kid in the suburbs' Oscar-bait spec script? Yes, family members lie to one another. Yes, sexual identity is sometimes all you can think about as a teen. Yes, suburbs tend to look the same. We all noticed.

But as everyone who's actually lived in a suburb (and isn't a self-absorbed head case) knows, you make your own life out there - and no matter what the houses look like, no matter how weird it is that the working people all go elsewhere from morning 'til night (how about taking that sociological complication seriously for God's sake!?), any two suburbanites' experiences are as different as any other two people's. While you're busy fretting over your Smiths albums and you're busy jacking off to pictures of Mary Lou Retton, two kids down the street are making a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark - and their next-door neighbour almost certainly isn't a molester or a drug dealer. The average community is sometimes just an average community, and people's problems are only problems; and as much as we'd like to see the banality of your average Hollywood screenwriter's childhood as somehow revelatory, it's not news to point out in broad, self-righteous language that people are screwed up. (And plastic bags floating on the goddamn breeze aren't beautiful. Grow up.)

Maybe you thought Blue Velvet was a revelation when you saw it stoned out of your gourd in college; maybe you liked American Beauty parked next to a cute girl on the last night of the semester; maybe you haven't worked out your resentments toward your high school classmates fifteen years on, and feel the need to pretend the entire world is a diorama and J.D. Salinger wrote the goddamn script for your adolescence, down to the wardrobe. The rest of us would like our fictional suburbs differentiated, please, and treated with the creative respect you would afford anyplace that people live, grow up, die, raise children, even believe. Can we please at least start.

[Bonus happy moment: I was impressed by the portrayals of suburban lie in The Secret Lives of Altar Boys and Donnie Darko. Both of which perhaps you've seen, but whatever.]

Clinton won the popular vote in Nevada by something like 6% as I recall - but Obama got one more delegate than she did. Both candidates have something to be pleased about today, and Obama's gotta be excited about Carolina. I'm glad we're coming out of the stupid herd mentality of the Iowa/NH primaries and their abysmal press coverage. It all feels slightly less tacky now.

Slightly, mind you.

(Sidebar: McCain! Whoa. I still want to see him against Obama; it'd do the country good to see what could be a very gentlemanly race, and Obama would win.)

More specifically, why am I such a dick about shyness, softness of voice, introversion? I don't think it's just 'I hate whom I've been,' though that's certainly part of it (I mean, you've read this blog, right?). And it's not just bound up in the self-esteem problems of friends and girlfriends, starting with my best (non-brother) friend in high school, in retrospect a typical somewhat depressed teenager who really, really wanted to get out of her suffocating life (the difficulties of which I never fully acknowledged, never wanted to I guess), whose complaints and entreaties eventually wore on me and wore me out. Or I would like to believe that this is a somewhat considered stance. But then how do you know?

Well that's one of the critic's conundra, you presumably know, hereafter analogized: I dislike shyness, am irritated by what I take to be the conscious decision to remain inside oneself when the world calls; and I have a Theory about it and terms of structure in which to talk about this characteristic. And I can't know for certain whether the Theory is a way of justifying to myself an irrational dislike, or the dislike is confirmation (in some twisted way) of the Theory's correctness. i.e. I'm constantly disappointed by other people's decisions to turn away from confrontations, but I'm not sure I didn't at some point post a bulletin on the inside of my skull saying This Is A Think You Will Be Disappointed By, to make my own surliness more palatable to me by comparison.

The Theory maybe you know already, and it's desperate to rise to the level of Philosophy. It goes like this:

'Shy' isn't something you are, it's something you do, or a way of doing...like Love. At every moment you choose to act or not, to speak up or not, and 'I am shy' isn't an explanation for your choices, it's only a description of them. The moment you act out you don't 'overcome your shyness,' a phrase that credits the substance of supposed shyness too much. Rather, you simply act in a way other than shyly. It's a goddamn adverb, and its noun form is a goddamn mask, a feint!

Similarly with 'creative.' Similarly with 'good.' So many people are so desperate to believe that there's a good person inside people who act badly, and that purity of good intention will remedy the effects of bad action. But what this means is: I hope tomorrow is better than today, and more specifically it means 'I hope for this improvement notwithstanding the evidence suggesting tomorrow's gonna be well fucked.' In order to get to a non-fucked tomorrow, you have to change something. You can't change your feelings directly; only your actions. In many ways your feelings will follow, assuming you're in the fat part of the psychological Gaussian. (If you force yourself to smile and you're not freakily accustomed to it, you'll get a little boost of energy. Sometimes that's all you need. Absolutely not sustainable, I know, but it's a tiny example of feeling following function. Er, form. Hmm, didn't really figure that one out before typing.)

A woman in her mid-20's posted to Ask MetaFilter this week, inquiring as to how to convince someone in complicated circumstances that he should marry her and not someone else. My response was predictable: you can't. You can only make it worthwhile for him to make that decision on his own. And more debatably: if Boyfriend was gonna pull the trigger, he'd have done so by now. I mean that's not always true, fine, but it's a guiding principle, not a rule.

The big deal for me wasn't her question (which seemed straightforward). Rather, I was pissed off that she insisted that she didn't want to read anything that would deepen her level of despair, so she only wanted suggestions on how to remedy the situation. Answers of the form 'DTMFA' were not welcome. (He won't tell his parents about her, after a year. And so forth.)

Being told that bad news or blunt advice isn't welcome infuriates me. It's like running a company and ignoring any report that earnings are down, redirecting the complain email address to /dev/null, ridding the Board of realists...

...actually, it's like being George W. Bush. The President of the United States, the most powerful idiot on Earth, is practically the archetypal case of Treating A Choice Like A State. He's shy (metaphorically speaking).

We can perhaps define Love as 'confusing desire with necessity.' Or what's The Matrix all about? 'You can't see past a choice you don't understand.' That's the ethical definition of a category mistake. 'If only I'd been nicer to her she wouldn't have left.' 'If only I'd spent five more hours a day at the office, I might have gotten that promotion.' 'If only I show him fifty more ways that I love him so so so so so much, he'll love me back that way.' Thrice wrong.

'Love' is a slippery term and it justifies all manner of stupidities. It's a lexical catch-all, a way out through words, and its close cousin is the class of descriptions like 'shy' and 'good.' And 'evil.' As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, 'You can't think your way to right action, you have to act your way to right thinking.' George Bush of all people would know that - but then The Good Lord Himself is George's sponsor. Those of us without a direct line to the deity are advised to take the proverb seriously. Our state of being describes the progress and outcomes of our actions - our choices. To that extent, you can certainly be a 'shy person' - just like you can be a 'person in Georgia' or a 'person watching television.' Forgetting that the button next to Channel Up has the amazing power to switch the goddamn thing off. And back on if you wish for safety and comfort later, memories being what they are, death being what is, you being whom and how you choose.

It's helpful to be able to talk about 'access to one's abilities' or gifts, and to describe different grades of that access: in particular, to talk about provisional access to one's gifts, as Robert Penn Warren did to David Milch (speaking of e.g. Ezra Pound and Coleridge). I believe this helps our discussion of creativity because it sets up inability to create as a problem whose parameters are theoretically knowable, and whose solution can be approached systematically. In short, talking about 'writer's block' and its equivalents as discrete states into which we move is unhelpful: this is like describing 'not yet having gone to the store' as a disease, the cure for which is the state of being at the store. I'll stick to writing for the moment, though the following discussion pertains to many creative endeavours, indeed to a creative cast of mind. 'Writing' is a complex process, and one of its early steps is 'overcoming the seeming inability to write.' If that initial step seems complicated, we describe ourselves as having 'writer's block,' some unique thing. A Big Problem. But writer's block is like shyness: it labels as an inability a transitional state that differs only in degree from what we label ability (getting the writing done).

We shouldn't, in other words, confuse evaluation with pre- and proscription.

My own writing process is variable, or rather it seems that way because I have only provisional access to my own gifts. Mastery would be (seemingly) effortless recall of the creative state. Call it what you like: 'flow' state, tapping your inner writer, a visit from the muse, etc. 'Visions come to prepared spirits,' Milch is fond of repeating. But the preparation can itself be systematized. Indeed, that is mastery. The length and complexity of the systematic process is what separates normal people from genius: one suspects that Michael Jordan needed less warmup time than his compatriots to access his extraordinary physical gifts, as did George Best - that they would dominate a pickup game as easily as a professional match.

But then, they did warm up. Every game.

For the first twenty days of November 2005 I wrote nearly 2,000 words per day; by the end of that period I'd fallen into a productive routine, in which the heat of inspiration motivated me to complete a daily warmup ritual. The inspiration made the ritual bearable; the ritual made the inspiration knowable. (I repeated the daily ritual a year later, which consisted incidentally of a half-hour to an hour of writing in a particular form, interspersed at times with abstract or mannered readings to limber up my verbal faculties. Nothing extraordinary, but then the substance of ritual rarely is.) So many things are that way. In long-term relationships, sexual pleasure loses its primacy among reasons for being together, but the pleasure itself deepens; the lengthening lulls between fits of passion in so many relationships don't mark the fading of lust, only a commitment to systematization instead of fancy. The lust itself is still lust, and something else as well. When the shock of the new wears off, what you're left with is self-knowledge: I am in a new world with this thing (the desire to write, a text, a lover, the desire to make love) and I must find a better way to live with it. Every day rather than today.

You might say that believing in tomorrow, building for a future, means recognizing that today is not the very last day: which is a partial or beginning recognition that we are alive and will go on living. Which is a recognition that we will die. Young love and lust, the need to write or paint felt more strongly than the desire to create (to give away - perhaps that is creation), these feelings deny that tomorrow will arrive. Well, and if you're lucky you'll finish this story or this painting or this perfect kiss tonight. And if you're unlucky - if your faith in transcendence (escape from the future [death] through the moment) turns out to have been misplaced - then you weren't going to die or turn into a pumpkin in the morning. And you'll be poorer until you get back to that perfect moment.

Provisional or incomplete access to your creative gifts: this is a lack of faith.

* * *

Lust consumes, of course, and one key myth of artistic creation is that it works the same way. But that heat isn't the central element in the creative process. Or rather: inspiration is necessary but not sufficient.

When I get what I take to be a great idea, I generally write it down somewhere; if I'm at my desk, I'll type it on my computer, else I've got notebooks to hand wherever I go, for that purpose. 'Ubiquitous capture' is the currently fashionable term for this ancient practice. Maintaining a 'prepared spirit' is another way of putting it. The more you accustom yourself to writing down idle thoughts, the more your mind will train itself to think verbally. Similarly, if you accustom yourself to thinking and responding to the world in pictures, or in melody, then your idle thoughts will begin to come to you in that form. 'The whole time I've been working on this project I've dreamed about it at night.' Well, yes. Of course. Practice makes perfect; your mind interprets this immersion as practice, of a sort.

Eventually, immersion prompts a feedback loop (or several), whereby we confront problems entirely in a certain set of terms and begin to respond to them 'instinctively' in the same terms. This is only a rough definition of learning, and this 'insight' has certainly entered broad awareness, but its implications for creativity seem to be widely overlooked. Let's put it another way: a ball atop a hill and a ball at the bottom of a valley are both at equilibrium: they're both where they want to be, standing still. An object at rest will tend to remain at rest.

But obviously the ball at the top of the hill won't return to its resting place if nudged, whereas the ball in the valley will (if unimpeded) roll back to its original spot when kicked (unless it's kicked hard enough to clear a nearby hill). The ball on the hill, in other words, rests in an unstable equilibrium; its valley counterpart is at a stable equilibrium. But both are resting. And here's the thing: the two situations are identical, from the perspective of the balls themselves.

A person unused to accessing her creative gifts sees herself as resting in the valley: she has no sense of how much effort it will take to get out, and when she succeeds, what she learns (or believes she's learned) is: I got out. I can get out. But how? She can't assess the ground on which she's resting. Her counterpart on the hill only needs a nudge: gravity takes over and she starts to pick up speed. It takes only recognizing your motion and accepting it. Which is partly self-analysis and partly (seemingly) open-ended risk-taking.

What the 'uncreative' person can't do is recognize when she's rolling. She doesn't know how to immerse herself; she doesn't know which internal forces are beneficial, creative, unless they're of enormous magnitude. (And that is a learned or acquired state.)

And yet we know when we're having a good time; we know when a story moves us, recognize when we're immersed in a narrative or social situation. We know what it is to be transported. It remains for us to link creative action with this feeling of immersion - to find a way to rest at the top of the hill. Sometimes that's as simple as carrying a notebook around everywhere you go. Sometimes it means going to a writers' colony, or taking a class (carving out a portion of each day or week to devote to creative activity - ritual and sacred spaces again). Sometimes it means warming up your writing mind for 30-60 minutes before taking up your novel for the day. Sometimes it means nothing more than finishing the day's work in midsentence, so as to facilitate picking it up again tomorrow.

Andrea DiSessa, in his extraordinary book Changing Minds, talks about creative exploration and intellectual inquiry as a roller coaster: a tough problem is a steep hill to climb, and enthusiasm gives us the velocity to get partway up without too much pain. Solving the problem means letting go and tumbling down the other side of the hill. Self-directed learning means choosing which hills to climb, but it also means responding to the dictates of gravity and momentum - i.e. if you're rolling fast enough in one direction, you'll keep going because it's easiest, and importantly because it's the most fun. DiSessa intends a lesson about curricular and instructional design (about the importance of harnessing student enthusiasm and allowing free inquiry to direct pedagogical structure), but we can take another lesson: if we don't find the process of preparation and structuring-of-creativity enjoyable - in metaphorical terms, if we don't enjoy climbing the first hill - then we'll have a hard time adapting to the dictates of our in-the-moment imaginings. 'Provisional access to our creative gifts,' then, also means not yet having found the pleasure and freedom in creative work.

Creative play yields smarter, more flexible, more adventurous, more daring creators; but creative work is what turns out creations. The one bleeds into the other when you learn to treat the work itself playfully, coming to a more 'adult' relationship with the mechanisms of creativity instead of just the feelings of satisfaction and engagement they breed.

Or rather: when you stop thinking of creativity as all about you, you'll unlock something in yourself. It may be paralyzing at first, but openness and generosity will come, as will the sustainable energy and strength that come with doing great works on behalf of others. Dopey? OK, dopey. 'Quit playing around.' There's fun for all on the other side of just playing, if you'll only make it.

18 January 2008

[Update: The tone of this piece is much darker than it needs to be. There's talk that it's not a bad deal; there's talk that it's a very mixed bag; there's talk that it's a big win for writers and directors alike. And as Joss Whedon puts it, "We need, now as much as ever, to act as if the strike is NEVER going to end. We need the rage that sends us out onto the picket lines, the passion that makes us look for alternate methods of financing and developing content, and the unity that reminds us how much the studios have taken from the community already by forcing this strike. As far as the WGA is concerned, the studios have not made one decision based on fair business practices. (Funny side-note: they've also abused writers as long as there has been filmed entertainment.) Some of the things that have been broken in these last months can never be fixed, some truths about the studios' power-grubbing inhumanity that can never be forgotten, or laughed over (as they have been for decades)." I'm skeptical about the AMPTP's good faith and irritated by the fawning stupid press coverage of the DGA (and of directors vs. writers generally), and in spite of personal interest in the existence of a ludicrous system like Hollywood, the fact is, it's a system whose exclusive hold on major-media content creation and distribution will and should end. The sooner the better. Increasingly, that's the real meaning of the WGA strike, and the DGA settlement sure as hell doesn't change that.]

The Directors Guild settled with the AMPTP yesterday. Rumours are floating that the writers' strike is about to be undercut to an extent by some high-profile 'fi-core' defections. ('Financial core means you remain in the union but go back to work, forsaking your right to vote on, or participate in, union leadership, but still paying dues for nonpolitical activities and still receiving the benefits of your guild's collective bargaining agreement.')

As things stand, if the writers hold out until summer, the Screen Actors Guild goes on strike, and Hollywood temporarily goes dark. The relatively quick DGA settlement gives me the usual uncalled-for dismissive feelings: of course the directors don't feel the need to strike, for the most part they're contractors brought in to work on the pieces that the writers create. Why should ownership stake be of vital interest to them? Of course that attitude is unfair and in some cases inapplicable, but it's clear that the current ways of assigning credit and ownership are even more unfair (and carry very real financial and creative consequences). Directors have too much power relative to writers in Hollywood films - not true on TV - and though they're at the mercy of the production houses and financiers, they receive accolades that obviously should accrue to those who, y'know, 'think the stuff up.' (Read the reviews of Cloverfield for a shining, laughable example: the name most breathlessly praised is that of J.J. fucking Abrams, who produced the film. Drew Goddard, who wrote the thing, is hardly mentioned. Those in the know know that he's a gifted writer, but film critics don't know how to care about screenplays for a variety of reasons. Some good, most bad.)

In terms of man-hours, the writer on a Hollywood film contributes a lot less than every other department. But Hollywood has nothing without them: it's not the goddamn writers featured in the endless parade of upskirt paparazzi photos, Scientology videos, 'let's save the Africans' banality, and pathetic Big Brother-style self-pimping. With few exceptions, that's what's left when you take away the texts to play. And the radical unfairness of the writers' existing arrangements with Hollywood - indeed, the vacuity and greed of the only-blockbusters, all-the-time commercial film ecosystem - should be more than enough reason to keep striking, to find new avenues for expression.

Hollywood is increasingly a big-budget specialty shop, and in the next few years we'll see one curious outcome of this strike: that a long negotiation with the AMPTP was the force that pushed an enormous number of creative professionals away from their relationships with those six grotesque corporations, and into new, more independent arrangements, with smaller audiences at first but growing, expanding. Every day the AMPTP keeps this up, that's another storyteller who'll be convinced to find some other sandbox to play in. They're losing business and potential workers not only today but from now on. Which means hard times for some...but good news. For everyone.

This passage from Anatoly Lieberman thrilled me, and not in a Luddite way:

Our civilization has reached a stage at which together we are extremely powerful and in our individual capacities nearly helpless. We (that is, we as a body) can solve the most complicated mathematical problems, but our children no longer know the multiplication table. Since they can use a calculator to find out how much six times seven is, why bother? Also, WE can fly from New York to Stockholm in a few hours, but, when asked where Sweden is, thousands of people answer with a sigh that they did not take geography in high school: it must be somewhere up there on the map. There is no need to know anything: given the necessary software, clever machines will do all the work and leave us playing videogames and making virtual love. The worst anti-utopias did not predict such a separation between communal omniscience and personal ignorance, such a complete rift between collective wisdom and individual stultification.

OK so here's a proposal in line with those claims:

What if the 'wisdom of crowds' meme has met such an enthusiastic welcome among the lite-intellectuals of our culture not because it so accurately describes the real workings of collective intelligence, but because it justifies to us the ready relinquishing of individual power? That is to say: 'rugged individualism' is something we as a culture value, but it's not something we teach - like making a marriage work, we're happy to praise you if you manage it, but we sure as hell don't have any lasting memory of how it was done, and we're quicker to encourage than to enable. The 'wisdom of crowds' narrative - the growth of collective intelligence - is the flip side of another narrative, the loss of faith in independence, not to say the death of the capacity for independent thought, necessarily.

Cass Sunstein says we're learning more about less, though it's clearly we're not learning more deeply (just 'more'); I put in a cover letter the other day that I was skilled at finding answers to technical questions, by way of excusing that I didn't know those answers myself. It's a real skill, you know - there are classes of question you're better off asking me to google rather than just googling them yourself. I find quickly. Meaning that as long as the Internet exists in its present form, I'm incredibly capable. Extensible, even. But how much of it am I taking away? How translatable is that knowledge, how readily will my reading knowledge of Ruby and HTML translate to community-building? Why have I not committed myself to increased facility in these areas that are important to me? Why am I not saving up?

OK let's not get silly here. To bring it back a little: transformative art and cultural artifacts tend to be made by experts, not by mobs. The 'wisdom' of crowds isn't wisdom, it's near-knowledge. Information. And information alone doesn't make community. We may be getting smarter as a group but we're worse at grouping, They Say, and I suppose the Wisdom of Crowds Cottage Industry might have as its narrativising purpose nothing more than reassurance: it's OK that we are inept. Mathematically we are expected to be inept. Let's lull ourselves to sleep with stories of the ineptitude of great women and men throughout the ages; let's reassure ourselves we could quite easily have lived without them. Which is to say: without the hard work they did and do.

'Saving up.' That's the key here: the loudening popular narrative of the value of shallow knowledge works to praise a culture of intellectual borrowing rather than saving and reinvesting. Crowds don't grow knowledge, they mark its location on a map and return there. Buried in the ground, it has no opportunity to mix and intermingle with other ideas, to spawn crazy notions. It is in no danger of becoming genius. Genius could reside momentarily inside anyone, but I believe in the importance of a culture that encourages exploration of great ideas, their working-over, their deepening. Heavens forfend we have to rely on...academics...to do our thinking for us. (One possible description of or reason for our resentment toward the moneyed and degreed, eh?)

The one-word description of the above state - 'communal omniscience and personal ignorance' - is decadence. Dark clouds.

16 January 2008

Usually we head to the MIT gym on Tuesdays: some pushups, situps, jumping jacks, maybe a few dozen of this doofy squat/press combo thing that invariably leaves my thighs feeling like tempered steel afterward (if steel felt like ow), then off to the weight room for the usual Huge Train routine. It's nice. I'd worried about sacrificing one of our weekly Big Fitness Days on the altar of the milonga; it's not like I'm gonna stick to salad to make up for lack of exercise. Well, I needn't have worried so much: I woke up this morning with fun fun burning pain issuing from every joint and muscle, not least my back, which was also causing some of my I Didn't Know I Could Stand Up Straight Instead of Hunching Over Like a Goddamn Bell-Ringing French Literary Character neurons to fire. Gaily. They gaily fired. Ow.

I have much to look forward to. Including, perhaps, an Advil. Marvolo, Reader(s). Absolutely marvolo.

(Sidenote: don't bother googling 'tango howto'; some asshole invented a programming language by that name. Might I suggest searching YouTube, which has an entire, like, 14-part instructional series? Plus an armful of other tango instruction in grainy frame-dropping video form, gratis. The earth offers up her virtue once more all digital-like.)

15 January 2008

If you are nervous about switching between partners at, say, your local beginners' tango class - abandoning your fiancée to dance with God knows what unsavory heathen types - do not be nervous. It is such a wonderful thing and it will improve your dancing quite rapidly.

We will talk about social glue soon, and I will no doubt cite Bowling Alone, and this will turn into one of those blogs, at least for a time. And I'll gush about how exciting it is to put on actual dancing shoes and stare into someone's eyes (or over her shoulder) with an accordion playing. Man oh man.

Unsurprisingly, some (nominally lefty) bloggers are up in arms over the president's comment about his daughter's fiancé's proposal:

He kind of sidled up to me and said, Can I come and see you? We were sitting outside the presidential cabin here, and he professed his love for Jenna and said, would I mind if he married her? And I said, Got a deal. [Laughter] And I'm of the school, once you make the sale, move on. But he had some other points he wanted [to make]. He wanted to talk about how he would be financially responsible...

The bone of contention is Bush's use of the phrase 'make the sale' - memories of dowries and virgin brides spring up. But wake up, fools: he's talking about the fiancé overselling himself. To the president. Which is an affable turn of phrase, and merits at most a question about 'Why should the suitor or the daughter need the dad's permission?' Which is beside the point.

Choire (pronounced 'Cory,' apparently) Sicha is guest-blogging for Jason Kottke this week. Sicha comes from Gawker, a rubbish commercial blog about New York gossip, like Page Six without any real cachet (ha ha) - and while the blog itself is merely bad, what's awful is its huge readership. You get the Web you deserve.

This is his Sicha's Kottke.org post in its entirety; I think it handily sums up many things that are wrong with blogs as they are widely understood today:

I have finally found the guy I want to marry. Seriously, this is my favorite YouTube video right now, and I'm not even sure that I can explain why. Something about the soft color, and the quiet. And he's so sensitive. (I sure hope he's 18 or older or I'm gonna feel real bad inside.)

...only it looks better on Kottke.org because when you have nothing to say your CSS better be fucking spotless.

14 January 2008

I now quite casually and happily claim that The Wire is the greatest drama in American television history, for some value of 'greatest' that includes rigorous craft, narrative drive, social richness, characterological integrity (not depth), and a wholly personal notion of entertainment value; certainly there's never been another series with its scope and integrity at every level. Its brutal cynicism is grounded in an honest appraisal of the limitations of human beings and institutions, and its every technical particular is top-tier. There's no character on the show with the complexity of Tony Soprano or Al Swearengen (or Buffy Summers), but that kind of full-bodied emotional portraiture isn't David Simon's aim, so the show's broad-brush characterization reads as a limitation of the form rather than a failure of craft. If the show focused more on the day-to-day wackiness of Being Jimmy McNulty, it would miss opportunities to situate him and his fellow citizens in their various interlocking worlds. And Simon and his fellow writers certainly filled the show's subcultures with hard-earned detail (listen to that final conversation between Chris and Michael in the Season Four finale, or Landsman's lovely generosity in the same episode).

Deep down, the show is a brief in Simon's career-long indictment of the 'postmodern' American way of life; as his recent interviews in support of Season Five have made clearer than ever, it's the summation of everything he's ever done, seen, and felt. Fans of the show have had plenty to read about him and his work of late: from the New Yorker profile a few months ago to the recent round of interviews and (to me) unexpectedly critical media coverage.

If you've never seen the show, try the New Yorker piece first; The Wire's fans won't be too surprised by anything in there, but it's a nice overview of where its creators stand. The two meatiest reads are this weirdly uplifting Columbia Journalism Review piece, and a recollection in Esquire by Simon himself, clarifying his purpose in putting together Season Five and focusing on the media (and defending himself against charges of unseemly grudge-holding).

The CJR piece - which (its focused consider of The Wire as journalism notwithstanding) reads oddly in its opening paragraphs, like a press release from Simon himself, mimics Simon's politics with dull boilerplate, and has no aesthetic-critical value - closes like this:

The Wire, [Simon] says, is about the decline of the American empire. It might have sprung from a journalistic impulse, but he says he has moved beyond simple reportage. "Consider it a big op-ed piece," said Simon, “and consider it to be dissent. What I saw happen with the drug war, a series of political elections, and vague attempts at reform in Baltimore....What I saw happen to the Port of Baltimore, and what I saw happen to the Baltimore Sun — I think it's all of a piece." Should his premonition of the American empire's future — more gated communities and more of a police state — come to pass and were someone to say he didn't know it was coming, Simon said, it will at least be possible to pull The Wire off the shelf and say, "'Don't say you didn't know this was coming. Because they made a fucking TV show out of it.'"

Go have a read. I should note that The Sopranos is more in line with what I think of as the Great American Dramatic Tradition(s): it's a carefully-observed family story through which a social story is outlined, occasionally presented in a cartoonish register and structured according to familiar genre dictates; and its moralizing tone, however cynical it may be about the existence of people like Tony and his band of thugs, invests the narrative with a weight of guilt that The Wire never comes close to inducing (The Wire is too rigorously empathetic; it never takes shots at its characters, and contains only one or two real grotesques). And Deadwood is somewhere inbetween, more complex in its interpersonal relationships than David Chase's show, more spiritual (and optimistic) than either The Sopranos or The Wire, with all of the former's poetry and much of the latter's rich institutional inquiry (though at a level of remove - through language and indirection - that makes it more fable, myth of origin, than history). All three might make legitimate claims on the title of 'greatest TV drama ever,' but tonight I give the nod to Simon's show. Not that you care, of course.

I hope you had a good weekend, Reader(s). We'll talk soon. [Hat tip to my boy Farhad for these articles, by the way - he who's never even seen the show!]

12 January 2008

Well little trooper, I'm gonna give you a piece of advice here and I want you to take. So listen up: if you're writing voice-over and you decide to take a break, which you're gonna want to do from time to time, go ahead and read a book on your break. That's fine. But don't read the goddamn Singing Detective. Just like when you're doing homework you don't skip to the answers in the back of the book. You've at least got to try to answer them on your own first. OK?

11 January 2008

Even if more people want equality more than any other social arrangement, by the approval voting mechanisms that (you might say) prevail in America, amicable inequality may well sail to victory in the social sweepstakes. It takes only a miniscule preference to push the social system toward crashing 'meanspirited' inequality - which is its own equilibrium point or points, and unstable only from certain points of view.

09 January 2008

The Boston Public Library has free wireless for cardholders, enormous reading tables, plenty of sunlight, and strict rules (actually enforced!) about cell phone usage in the reading room. The chairs are a bit low compared to the tables - bad for laptop typists - and there's no food allowed at the tables, which is a mixed blessing. But overall it's one of the best places in Boston for a quiet day's work on your this-or-that. I do love working at the big table at the BU Espresso Royale, surrounded by law school and med school types yapping about torts and knee joints, while the irritating hipster employees deal out their magnificent assortment of sweets and pastries; but it's hard to beat the BPL. Particularly given the music policy at Espresso Royale, apparently no more complex than 'louder is fucking better.' Well, nothing in this world is perfect except the end.

You wake up and tell your fiancée about your incredibly vivid dreams by improvising a 2-minute long recitative, complete with funky syncopation in the middle, instead of (like a normal person) just saying it. Of course to clarify the bit about the Indian reservation and the comic books and the dormitory-style hallways connecting the German woman's psychology clinic to the general store and the naked college students drinking on the floor, you have to speak a bit at the end, but by that point you feel you've accomplished something, so it feels like reaching out instead of giving up.

The other dream I feel guilty telling y'all about because it involved several readers of this here blog and was definitely rated PG-13, at least.

Good day for the country, I'd say. I've never voted in a presidential election before, and I'm looking forward to casting my vote for that skinny fella from Illinois. I hate the stupid Iowa/New Hampshire electoral circus, but this is a nice thing to wake up to. Equally heartening: Edwards caught and passed Clinton. Good day.

03 January 2008

The other day I was listening to Paul Simon's Songs from the Capeman (did you know Derek Walcott co-wrote the lyrics?) and something struck me. The first song on the album, 'Adios Hermanos,' contains these lyrics, in the voice of convicted 16-year-old killer Sal Agron:

I entered the courtroom,State of New York, county of New YorkJust some spic they scrubbed off the sidewalkGuilty by my dressGuilty in the pressLet the Capeman burn for the murders

Well the Spanish boys had their day in courtAnd now it's time for some fucking law and orderThe electric chair for the greasy pair!Said the judge to the court reporter

The AllMusic review of the album calls Songs from the Capeman 'a cerebral exercise, not only in writing but also in white liberal guilt, and [...] an exhausting one at that'; the NYTimes talked about the album/play's 'bleeding heart'; and so forth. Critics responded badly to this 'liberal guilt' aspect of the show, sounding the usual refrain that Simon's 'liberal pieties' got/get in the way of his undeniable songwriting skill. And of course you hear this phrase all the time: everyone knows 'liberal guilt' is the reason self-proclaimed liberals give parking spaces to cripples, let negroes out of prison, offer broads unearned raises in salary, punish nice boys for killing faggots, and object to torturing ragheads.

Now, the phrase 'conservative guilt' makes little sense for the definition of 'guilt' in use here (basically 'regret at having done something wrong'). But of course 'guilt' is what you're imbued with by virtue of having done something wrong: being guilty and feeling guilty are different things. The common slander is that liberals feel guilty - specifically, they feel unnecessary guilt. Give Willie Horton a job making license plates so as to continue having a life of some sort, that's cold economic/cultural necessity; give him a weekend of free air, that's pure pity. Must be; liberals don't think rationally about such things. (Never mind that the stated intention of the Massachusetts prisoner furlough program that set child-murderer Horton free to twice rape a Maryland woman was 'rehabilitation,' whether or not it was a terrible idea.)

Paul Simon's apparent sin, in humanizing the Capeman Salvador Agron, is extending to him sympathy to which he's no longer entitled, even in the context of an aesthetic experience like a Broadway musical.

One creepy aspect of the contemporary American conservative media establishment - which is largely inseparable from the conservative political establishment, if such things could ever have been teased apart anyway - is its twofold insistence that on the one hand, inequality and oppression are natural outcomes of human nature, not to be regretted or corrected, while on the other hand, its largely tacit acknowledgment that there's cause to feel bad/guilty about unfairness and systemic injustice, but great leaders know better. The reason for this last justification is simple: great leaders (starting with the Great Leader in the sky) have access to wisdom about the true worth of people, and the most moral way to move the human race forward is to write off the Human Failures of all kinds - criminals, C-/D+ students, the underpaid, the homeless, the diseased - up to the point where they personally affect us. The leader of the tribe gets to decide what's good for the tribe; in America, that's the president, in the county that may well be your cousin or neighbor, while in the home, that's Dad (occasionally Mom). So it makes sense to oppose legal abortion (the first example of 'conservative guilt' I could think of) nationally while paying for your daughter (or your friend's) to have an abortion.

'Liberal guilt,' in those terms, is an unnatural inversion of the precedence rules baked into the Way of Things. If you would make the same exceptions and provisions on a large scale that your more conservative brethren would only ever do locally or in their own homes, you are feeling something they don't, and that's fucked up.

Let's call this fucked up feeling...kinship with the (distant) other.

But is there a more admirable conservative trait than that?

* * *

[Some hands get waved hereafter.]

One way of defining conservatism is 'guarding your own.' In obvious terms, 'your own' is your family - and taking care of your family maybe means 'I keep what I earn so as to spend it on my loved ones,' 'I bear what arms I deem necessary to guard our well-being,' 'we pray how we like (or don't) and no one can take that away from us,' 'don't touch my stuff without asking,' and so forth. On a broader (but eminently reasonable) scale, that means providing for your neighbours, looking out for them and for your shared interests, seeking to maintain quality-of-life in your town, policing the streets, interacting fairly in a business/trade/coproduction sphere, enforcing property rights of one or another kind (this is key), and so forth. If the goal of conservative living is to preserve a way of life, then conservatism-with-teeth is an effective enough lifestyle, modulo the corrupting influence of the Internet and so forth. OK.

But one of the precepts of what I take to be smart, sensible liberalism is expanding your definition of 'your own.' Nowadays it's 'conservative' to wish that inequality didn't exist but do nothing about it at any level beyond the purely local, the ad hoc, and to decry attempts to systematize understanding of inequality/injustice (in their various forms). But I'm saying that an expanded sense of shared experience makes the parochialism and tribalism of reactionary conservatism richer, more effective: liberal 'pieties' are actually best practices for conservative living. i.e. If you have neighbours you don't know and therefore don't trust, the answer isn't to enlist their neighbours to watch them, it's to introduce yourself and get to know them. If they're the same colour as you and their last name sounds a bit like yours, this is nothing more than politeness; if they're darker or lighter, and their last name sounds like something out of Conrad, this is 'motivated by guilt' or somesuch. Yet even for an insufferably 'well-meaning liberal' type, this is a pragmatic maneuver, same as introducing yourself to Mr Smith and his smiling pink kids: strengthening your community. Implementing a more effective version of the same 'guarding your own' principle. This isn't to say liberalism is conservatism; it's to say they share aims, and can be compared as means.

Similarly, the way to be 'tougher on crime' is obviously not to be indiscriminate in who gets called a criminal, nor to be more brutal toward individual criminals; in most cases, I should think the answer is clearly to provide more and better alternatives to crime - to expand our thinking about how we might live lawfully. There are wicked people, yes, and they'll be even more obvious, easier to find and corral if necessary, once you've made altruism and communalism more profitable (in one or another sense), because the truly wicked will be making even more considered choices to behave the way they do. Meanwhile, those who commit crimes because they have no alternative...will have alternatives. For instance, inexpensive digital content delivery really is a viable alternative to illegal downloading. It works. Background checks don't restrict access to guns, only put a lower limit on strength of rationale for purchase. 'Tough on crime' means making it tough both to commit crimes and to justify doing so; it doesn't mean affecting a general air of 'toughness' and hoping the numbers work out. (Man, if you don't watch The Wire you're missing the most haunting journalistic work ever shown on television. Just for God's sake rent the thing. Season Four just came out on DVD; it's the best yet.)

Or look. It's well known that exposure to different lifestyles increases one's capacity for empathy. Tourism doesn't, except by accident: all you see as a tourist is a given community's tourist-facing businesses and 'attractions,' the fake version of itself it's put up for sale. But the only place 'city slickers' ever existed was in the minds of their rural counterparts; within the social system of a small town the slack-jawed yokel of urban myth is replaced by the usual, somewhat boring, complex lives of individuals; spend a week somewhere other than your hometown and you'll come home to a new place that's more complex, not less. Same goes for sexual desire: my childhood bigotry toward homosexuals lasted until I met my first happy, healthy, out gay fella(s) (in college) - and it's not liberal guilt that compels me to point out that the gay fella whose friendship I put aside in high school was unhappy and unhealthy in part because people like me didn't know how to be friends with people like him. But this awareness of the possibility of plain-ol'-love between two people with penises (or the other thing) hasn't undermined my ability to love women; it's enriched it, undercut some of the ludicrous myths about destiny and The Perfect Woman (And Her Perfect Man) that I held on to before I knew how relationships actually work. I'm not particularly old-fashioned about marriage and so forth, but the liberalization of my beliefs about relationships has strengthened my belief in the power of certain institutions and rituals and social orders, as well as expanding the definitions of those things. That's not a contradiction, it's a growth of imagination.

And let's say right here: the work of great art is to expand our imaginations by providing us with new ways of knowing and believing. If an artwork only flatters and reaffirms what we know and/or what its creators know, it's not great art, full stop. Hence, propaganda can not be great art, and great art can not also be propaganda. Creative freedom means resisting reductiveness in favour of clarification. Oh man they are so not the same thing.

OK so I wasn't out to toot my own horn a couple of paragraphs up; I'm a shithead and I hate everyone. But hopefully you see the value of personal example here. OK: moving on.

* * *

I hate feeling guilty, particularly about things I didn't do and can't control. I don't feel I've inherited the guilt of my slave-owning ancestors (expelled from Cuba to Puerto Rico in the mid-1800's, I'm told, by a slave revolt), because I don't believe in the inheritance of sin. But I've inherited circumstances, as have the descendants of their slaves, and those touched by the wickedness of the slave trade (i.e. everybody). We can look at circumstances and say they are or aren't fair, but that's slippery territory. Easier, more elementary, so ask whether they're good. And for whom. Now, the desire to rectify unjust situations may just stem from sympathy, which to my eyes is mainly selfish (I wish for bad things to be out of my world) and is an aesthetic failing to boot, or empathy, which is radically unselfish (I'll use up my wish for that guy). Great art and fair living grant you complex views of the world, which make empathy possible - and make mere sympathy crass.

Guilt is a lot more about sympathy than empathy (let's give Camille Paglia the benefit of the doubt and say, in passing, that shame (vs. guilt) is more authentically communitarian and therefore closer in spirit to empathy). Why the hatred of 'liberal guilt'? Because those who call out such a supposedly crass emotion don't want to be reminded of their own complicity. Yes there's a pathetic martyrdom-complex-by-proxy that's at work in NIMBYist fuck-the-pigs-hug-the-marginalized reactionary politics. But nothing makes people feel inadequate and immoral like seeing someone else play the martyr - or worse, actually be the martyr. Particularly if you're not part of the Chosen Few. And the real crime being pointed up by conservative critics of 'liberal guilt' is precisely that: suffering on their behalf. Because when you pledge to support affirmative action hiring laws or extend nondiscrimination protection or make a better, more efficient and humane welfare program, whose policies are you pushing back against? Generally not your 'well-meaning' liberal leaders', no. Liberal guilt implicitly points a finger: you got us into this mess. Which might not always be fair, this finger-pointing, but then unfairness is part of life, an unavoidable consequence of the Way Things Go, and who are we to blow against the wind?

* * *

Salvador Agron did stab two kids to death in Hell's Kitchen. The guilt for that action lay always with him, and his rehabilitation and rebirth in prison are testament to both the possibility for individual redemption and the value of second chances - even in our way-beyond-fucked-up judiciary and penal systems. He died at the age of 43, having lived twenty of those years behind bars. He was guilty of a wrong thing. The rest is up for grabs, and if you don't mind, I'd like to insist on the human right to feel bad not just for him, not just for the men he killed, but for the way-beyond-fucked-up world, thank you very much. I'd like to insist that we can grow from there. You may call me an optimist. Guilty as charged.

02 January 2008

I've often said that the sexiest stretch of music I have on record is the piano solo in Medeski Martin & Wood's 'Just Like I Pictured It,' off Combustication, thirty seconds so naughty I feel guilty putting that album on in polite company. But I'd like to submit that the sexiest six hours of music I've heard is surely the collection of bed-burners that makes up Miles Davis's 'On the Corner Sessions' box. Though I'm not 100% certain about that judgment: there are a few abrasive pieces in this collection, and the quietest moments are still more threatening than anything from the In a Silent Way sessions. Maybe this particular sonic landscape is just symbolically overloaded and it's the clavinet/guitar/wah-wah trumpet/processed soprano sax textures that fire certain neurons in my mindbrain. Still, the fact remains: throw on the last few minutes of 'He Loved Him Madly' and you'll never need to watch a Michael Mann movie again; 'Peace' sounds like it was performed by a group of musicians floating in a sea of Astroglide and red wine; 'Hip Skip' is what orgies sound like at Stevie Wonder's house; 'U-Turnaround' could be the soundtrack to a gigantic polychromatically perverse downtown sex romp where everyone speaks every language that ever existed and only walks in slooooow motion. And 'Jabali' is the invitation to the last party before they tear the whole city block down, drinks with names no one can pronounce, which all your friends got but you somehow didn't get, and then on the night of the thing someone slipped you a card with a number and you called it and that's the last thing you remember, and that's just fine.

01 January 2008

Seems to me that lifelong engagement with art enriches our lives primarily by showing us the reach (and limitations) of human aspiration, ambition, and craft (which is maybe 'inward aspiration'). Dwelling on failure (this is called 'ideological criticism') has its value, particularly as exposure, but I think we stop growing after a while if all we ever hear is 'This is a symptom of that.'